So, my birthday is Friday. 
I don’t know whether I’m excited or just tired. As I go toward it, there are so many different areas that are mentally dealt with. My birthday has always had a love/hate thing with me. I’m always super excited to get to it, but then ultra-subdued when it comes.
There have been some awful birthdays, which led me to trying to make sure each one is special and important. When I say awful, I mean awful. LOL To name a few: I’ve been, caught in a lighting storm, had my purse stolen, gotten in TWO car accidents, and then to put the cherry on top, my grandmother died on my fourteenth. So, birthdays haven’t always been the coolest things. Eventually, I decided that I would try and make each one special and important, no matter what I had to do.
I’ve been successful for the most part, throwing parties for myself, and loudly proclaiming Librafest from the rooftops as soon as the season begins. Though, where infertility is concerned, birthdays mean something different. Something far less festive. To be blunt, they are the embodiments of those biological clocks everyone is always talking about.
It’s funny to think of all the milestone birthdays we have as we grow up. Our first birthday is the one where our parents celebrate us being alive. The fifth birthday symbolizes one level of maturity as we reach “learning” age and kindergarten. The thirteenth birthday makes us a teen, and in some cultures, an adult. The sixteenth is sweet. The eighteenth makes us legal to smoke but not drink. The twenty-first gets us into the club. The twenty-fifth lowers our car insurance. And after that, you’re pretty much on a decade by decade shelf-life.
But in the child-bearing game, you’re already falling behind if you haven’t procreated by the thirtieth. At least if feels that way.
I feel like I’m behind. And I only have one year to catch up. To be a person who “had kids in their twenties”…I only have about 400 days. YES,… I said DAYS.
I try not to think this way. I really do. But to be honest, I’ve been thinking this way for about four years. I gauge my quality of parenthood on how old I’m getting. My mother had me when she was twenty-one and married. I’m twenty-eight, (for a few more days), so I’m already seven years behind. There is already seven years worth of energy and interest that I’ve lost. Seven years worth of time, gone.
And I can’t shake that thought.
The thought that if I’m not successful by this time next year, I will automatically be no less than thirty years older than my children. No matter what I do, or how I attain my family, I will already feel behind the curve. And I know it sounds silly, and ridiculous, but I look at my mother who is pretty young in my opinion, to have an almost-30-year-old, and I look at my sister who will always be just a decade and a half older than her daughter…and I feel late. I am perpetually tardy for the family-building party. As a 23 year-old bride, I have to say, I thought if anything, I would have been on schedule or a bit earlier than,…but then life threw me a curve ball.
Ah. But I’m thinking too much, no? Still, you know what’s funny? Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. The fact that somewhere, someone else is feeling the exact same way.
Every single birthday once you start “trying”, makes you think of birth days. Every year that passes feels like the culmination of 12 failures. The one present you may want the most, is one that nobody can pick you up at Target.
Still, in my usual Libra form, I have to look at things from the other side.
On that side, I’m so grateful to have almost 30 years of thinking and learning to be prepared for whatever fate brings my way. I’m grateful that in other areas of my life, things are blossoming, and for those reasons, I’m perhaps more advanced than my counterparts.
And at the very, very end of the day, I have to take heed to the fact that the truth of the matter is…no matter how I feel,…I’m really not that old.